


Falcs TV: Diaper Challenge

by audiaphilios



Series: From Tumblr With Lo-- [25]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Falcs TV, Gen, How To Baby, baby panic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-21
Updated: 2017-01-21
Packaged: 2018-09-18 22:52:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9406520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audiaphilios/pseuds/audiaphilios
Summary: “Zimmboni, Zimmboni. You must be patient. No race, with babies.”“Tater, this was literally a race.”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jenrose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenrose/gifts).



> I've changed the name of Thirdy's wife from Gemma to Carrie, to reflect canon, but have left everything else intact except for typos.

After the first few months of his rookie season, Jack has finally gotten used to the Falcs TV camera. There’s something in Tater’s easy comfort with the device that reminds him of Bittle’s Twittering, of Ransom and Holster’s selfie wars. He’s connected his new teammates enough with his old ones to start feeling a little comfortable, start getting playful, and the PR team is eating it up, even as mid-season approaches and Jack starts longing for a new crop of rookies to take the pressure off of him.

Until then, he is PR’s go-to guy for challenges against Tater, and now that the birth of Thirdy and Carrie’s fourth child is imminent, Jack finds himself at a table in the corner of the locker room with Tater, staring down at a baby doll and a stack of unrecognizable supplies in a state of barely-concealed panic. Jack loves kids, but babies inspire a kind of existential terror in him. He wonders, in his more darkly-humored moments, if this is a trauma response to his own beleagured babyhood.

(Carrie’s pregnancy has led to a number of chirps around changing their teammate’s name to Fourdy, which the man in question responds to with a kind of resigned horror. There’s a few more years and probably a Serious Poem before he reaches *that* milestone.)

Jack has learned, however, how to deflect when it comes to these challenges. And he tries to mask his incompetence with jabs and feints at Tater, who is approaching this task with a studious determination that raises a lot of questions, for Jack.

“How do you even know how to do this?” Jack asks him, while trying to inconspicuously steal all of the damp paper towels he’s pretty sure he’s only seen sitting on the back of toilets.

“Much practice,” Tater replies, snagging the unused wipe from Jack’s hand. “With Firsty and Secondy and Angelique.”

“Angelique?” Jack casually knocks the tub of what’s apparently called “butt paste” to the ground.

“Thirdy’s youngest, for now. My goddaughter!” Tater beams at Jack, and the camera, and the neatly wiped and pasted and diapered baby doll in front of him.

Jack is hurriedly tucking his own’s feet back into the one-piece outfit with a ridiculous number of clasps. He may lose his grip a time or two and nearly drop it over the side of the table, but he exclaims delightedly as he finishes, more or less, before Tater does, and has the baby over his shoulder as Tater finishes up his own.

“Zimmboni, Zimmboni. You must be patient. No race, with babies.”

“Tater, this was literally a race.” Jack is patting the baby on the back now. He’s shushing it almost without realizing it, grateful that something about this seems to come naturally.

Watching Tater’s comically large hands move confidently across the baby, fixing it and lifting it to his shoulder has settled something in Jack, something he feared but dared not name. His own shushing seems to benefit himself more than anything, now. Jack feels like they should be talking, for the sake of the camera still filming them, but before he can say anything, Tater starts humming.

After a little while, Jack asks, “What is that?”

“Old lullaby,” Tater responds softly. “Was sing to me, and I sing to baby.”

That nervous feeling, the baby-panic, fully subsides in Jack. If, in some distant future well beyond this rookie year, he reaches a point where– well. He’d have good people surrounding him, he thinks. He could learn how to do this.

(When the PR finally gets the video posted, the internet promptly breaks.)


End file.
